BILLY COLLINS
Guest Editor
The Best American Poetry 2006

Billy Collins is the author of six books of poetry, including Sailing Alone Around the Room (2001), Picnic, Lightning (1997), The Art of Drowning (1995), The Apple That Astonished Paris (1988), and Questions About Angels (1991), which was selected by Edward Hirsch for the National Poetry Series. He also has recorded a spoken-word CD, The Best Cigarette (1997). He has received fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Guggenheim Foundation. He has also won the Bess Hokin Prize, the Frederick Bock Prize, the Oscar Blumenthal Prize, and the Levinson Prize—allawarded by Poetry magazine. In October 2004, Collins was the inaugural recipient of the Poetry Foundation's Mark Twain Award for humorous poetry. He has served as a Literary Lion of the New York Public Library and he is a distinguished professor of English at Lehman College, City University of New York, where he has taught for the past thirty years. He served as Poet Laureate of the United States from 2001 to 2003.

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